Xperia X1 – My Tweaks

OK, I’m going to let my dirty little secret out now. Judging by the amount of emails I get asking me the same question, you may think I’ve got a wide selection of Windows Mobile phones to choose from. Images of cupboards gently popping out from walls probably come to mind, filled with all the latest gadgets and phones for me to choose from every morning. Alas, the reality is a lot different.

My phone of choice for some time has been the HTC Touch Dual. It’s got touch screen, it’s got a cool design and there’s a nice hidden numeric keypad. The only let-down for me was the lack of GPS and WiFi. The “ideal phone” for me would have a touch screen, numeric keypad and sliding QWERTY with WiFi, GPS and a great camera. Yesterday a Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 arrived on loan and initially I thought, “Meh, it’s a Touch Pro in different clothes”. However, I’ve quickly grown to like it. After updating the firmware I made a raft of tweaks. It occured to me that I’ve never really listed what changes I make to a phone after getting it out of the box. The tweaks tend to change on a phone-by-phone basis. For example, with the HTC Touch Dual I put PointUI Home 2 on plus a lot of other things, however the X1 called for a different set of changes… First up, using the phone I added the new SPB Mobile Shell Panel. Next, I grabbed XperiaTweak and disabled security warnings, disabled the screen going off during calls and altered the default web browser to Opera. Also within XperiaTweak I’ve set the default panel as SPB Mobile Shell so it’ll load that when the phone turns on, plus I’ve switched around the firstname / lastname listings and saved the settings.

Next I downloaded the excellent Smabergs actionscreen which adds an action screen assigned to the power button and appears after holding it for 3 seconds. This makes it feel like an “ordinary” Sony Ericsson phone and lets you text / email or switch to the camera / contact screens quickly.

Next, I grabbed the YouTube app and YouTube panel but then figured that I’d like to add a lot of stuff into my SPB Mobile Shell screen. Some things, like the excellent Media Experience panel for looking at pictures, aren’t accessible directly so I got the Pubba Panel Installer which lets me run a Panel as an app. Using SPB Mobile Shell you can add your own programs into the existing categories, so I did this with YouTube, S2P (an excellent free music player) and the media panel thanks to the Pubba Panel Installer.

I used the Dashwire panel to grab data from my old phone and import it into the X1.

Finally, I used My Mobiler to control the phone from my PC and Viigo to keep updated with RSS feeds (again, with a link into SPB Mobile Shell using the details above).

One last, but extremely important PC-based app I use daily, is Jeyo Mobile Extender. This is a phenomenal tool which plugs into your Outlook (on the PC) and lets you send texts from Outlook, via your phone, to the contacts in your phone.

Do you have any more tweaks ? What changes do YOU do to make your phone your own ? Let us know!